The Barbara Lee administration has released an eleven-point “Roadmap to Fiscal Health” for Oakland that promises to “achieve the financial resiliency necessary to weather future financial shocks.”
If you’re a bit skeptical about this, so am I. Lee has inherited or appointed most of the bureaucrats who steered Oakland into fiscal insolvency in the first place. These incompetents knowingly spent far more money than the city had. They were warned, over and over, not to do this; but they blew off the warnings, the same way that the Oakland School Board has blown off similar warnings, and for the same reason: they’re progressives. They firmly believe that they can spend money infinitely, because their allies on the City Council and on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors will always raise business and sales taxes, and impose parcel taxes on homeowners, if more money is needed to implement their agenda, which it always is.
This has been a liberal-Democratic belief for decades. As Harry Hopkins put it nearly a century ago,“We [Democrats] will tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” for as long as we can. The formula worked, until enough Americans saw through the hoax and decided to put a stop to it. You can’t “spend and spend” forever without bleeding American families to the bone. After all, we started one Revolution because of “taxation without representation” and we can do so again.
Lee’s eleven-point plan is laughable. What does it propose? She will “establish a fiscal health executive team to manage these financial initiatives.” Great! Just what we need—another progressive committee with a fancy name. Who will be on the team? “A broad array of administrators and other stakeholders.” I can see it now: Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas and all the other proto-communist agitators. What a joke. Lee will boast that her blue ribbon team’s credentials are impeccable, when in fact they’ll be just another woke interest group driving Oakland further into the ground.
What else? The new roadmap will “Diversify the revenue base with a new voter-adopted revenue proposal in 2026.” This new tax, you may have heard, will be a $40 million parcel tax, proposed by Kevin Jenkins. Property owners are, of course, always in the gunsights of progressives, who resent people who’ve worked hard to buy their own homes. Poor people are much more likely to vote for progressives, and thus it’s in the interests of progressives to keep the population poor and docile by—yes—taxing and taxing, spending and spending, and getting re-elected over and over again.
But wait, there’s more! Among Lee’s more preposterous proposals is one to renegotiate city contracts with employee unions, because the cost of payroll, benefits and pensions is completely out of control. Never mind that Lee and her “administrators” are the ones who agreed to these contract conditions to begin with. We’re now supposed to believe that SEIU and the other unions will happily hand back the money. You know and I know that that will never happen. The unions own the politicians, including Lee, who has no intention or ability to claw back anything from them.
Lee and her “administrators” are fully aware that their little plan will lead to nothing, so she’s had to resort what is, in her own words, a “contingency plan” for when it fails. What is that plan? “Leveraging philanthropic funds to augment available city resources.” Can’t you just see it now? Lee will go to the giant progressive slush funds she’s colluded with in the past—the California Nurses Association PAC, SEIU, the Engineers Union, the Progressive Era PAC and others—and persuade them to give her the hundreds of millions of dollars she needs to perpetuate her “progressive vision for Oakland.” I doubt that she’ll get the money. Even if she did, it would just kick the bankruptcy can further down the road. And speaking of kicking the can down the road, what is Lee’s plan when her Roadmap completely collapses? She will “establish efficiency and outcome performance measures for all city departments for inclusion in the next biannual budget, proposed to Council in May 2027.” That’s two years from now, plenty of time for Lee & Co. to keep the bamboozle and coverup going.
There are a lot more ridiculous ideas in Lee’s Roadmap, but suffice it to say the document is a mush of bureaucratese gobbledygook. It cannot work because it’s not intended to work. Lee and her progressive allies will never, ever allow Oakland to cut all the waste, fraud and abuse that is the inevitable result of their progressive efforts to promote “equity.” She got elected, as did the City Council, on keeping the grift and graft going, and they’ll never stop until we stop them.
Steve Heimoff